Love affair with a medium

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BRITISH artists from the late 18th century were experimenting with a different art form. They changed the way in which watercolour had been used and launched what later came to be seen as a golden age of painting.

Watercolour may not seem a cutting-edge medium compared with the many materials that artists use today but, at the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, artists such as John Varley and Thomas Girtin made innovations in the use of watercolour that challenged the dominance of oil as the main medium for painting.